Own Bomb Kills N. Ireland Militant

Published 7:00 pm, Thursday, January 3, 2002

A suspected anti-Catholic militant was killed when the pipe bomb he was carrying exploded in his face, police said Friday.

William Moore Campbell, 19, died when the bomb exploded Thursday night outside an abandoned house in the northern coastal town of Coleraine. Police said the victim lived nearby and the house was being used by Protestant paramilitary outlaws to store weapons.

Several homes in the mixed Catholic-Protestant neighborhood were evacuated as British army experts examined a second suspected bomb found nearby.

No group claimed responsibility for the blast. But police and politicians said it was linked to hundreds of pipe-bomb attacks on Catholic properties throughout Northern Ireland, including more than a dozen in this predominantly Protestant town.

"With so many pipe bomb and blast bomb attacks in Coleraine, it was inevitable that eventually somebody would lose their life, whether that was the perpetrator or the victim of this violence," said Coleraine's mayor, John Dallat, a Catholic.

Britain and security chiefs have previously blamed most of the pipe-bomb attacks on Northern Ireland's largest outlawed Protestant group, the Ulster Defense Association. Last year pipe bombs caused one death: A 16-year-old UDA member accidentally killed himself in November while trying to throw one of the crude homemade devices at police.

Also Thursday, a bomb was thrown through the window of a Catholic-occupied home in north Belfast, the most bitterly divided part of Northern Ireland's capital. There were no reported injuries, but police called the bomb substantial and said it had badly damaged a room.

In a third incident overnight, army bomb-disposal experts safely detonated a pipe bomb outside the home of a police officer in Annalong, a coastal town southeast of Belfast.